. . . provides greater access but still requires the ability to navigate unfamiliar waters with safety and then find the fish. If you plan to bring your own boat, do yourself the favor of making sure you have all the safety equipment on board that you might ever need. Furthermore, study the access to water maps and nautical charts before you leave and make any notes on courses and headings, while still at home. (fog and other common cape hazards like wind tend to make "on the water" navigation tougher than expected)
Leave yourself time when you arrive to actually get on the water and look around and set up your LORAN or GPS with local waypoints before you go fishing. (I can't tell you how many boaters I see trying and failing to navigate in fog or seas with the support of their electronics because they were in a hurry to get fishing and didn't log local waypoints and navigation buoys. It's unsafe, at the least.) Be cautious in bays and harbors. There are a lot of sandbars and the occasional rock in Cape waters. These things just aren't healthy for lower end units and hulls and let me say here that we have a name for flyfishermen standing on the bow while the captain motors the boat from one spot to another and unexpectedly runs aground. We call it air tourism. Leave enough casting room for the guys in the other boats too. Who knows, maybe some day they'll return the courtesy.
Fly fishing tackle afloat is comparable to that which you would use from shore; 8/9 wgt. rod, intermediate sinking line, 8-12# tippet. However, you should expect to find larger schools of actively feeding stripers further offshore than the beach fishermen can reach. By summer, bass from 22" to 40" are common and feeding on schools of sand eels, pogies, butterfish, mackerel, silversides, squid and herring fry.
Be prepared to "run and gun" from one surface feeding locale to another within a quarter mile. This usually means holding the rod in hand while traveling and standing on the line to prevent tangles. Sometimes there is only time for one or two casts before the fish "go down". You can lengthen this time somewhat if you are alone on the school by circling upcurrent and drifting down upon the fish. Be cautious of boat noise and turn off the engine when doing this. It isn't the stripers that are scared by your sounds it is the bait and when they flee for depth the stripers follow.
On days when you can't reach the feeding fish before they sound or they seem erratic and unpredictable, they are probably feeding deeper than you can readily see but are still present. Motor upcurrent from likely water and drift through fishing deeper than you usually would. This may mean letting an intermediate line sink for a twenty or twenty five count before starting your retrieve in order to achieve fifteen feet of depth.
A good all around choice of fly on big waters is a blue/white deceiver on a 1/0 hook. The standard strip is one handed and about two feet in length. When fishing the bottom of bays or harbors, use the clouser in chartreuse or olive instead, #1 hook. Use a somewhat shorter strip but be sure to get the fly to the bottom.
Special situations exist for places like rips. Here you may well want to try to match the hatch for squid, mackerel, sand eels or herring that you see on the surface by choosing like sized flies and color combinations. Trolling is often more effective than a short cast with a big fly while bouncing through a rip. It is somewhat safer too to be sitting and holding a rod rather than standing and casting in short steep chop. Be sure to have plenty of backing, you can never tell when a 40+" fish might hit your fly and leave for England.
On the flats, there are times when longer leaders and flouro as well as smaller flies and cautious approaches are the only way to hookup. First try the clousers that you might use in the Bay. Then a deceiver on a #1 hook. If the fish aren't even looking you will have to try the crab just to be sure they are fussy and skittish before getting serious about stealth. In the end, a 12 foot leader ending in a 8# flouro tippet, a #6 tan clouser or shrimp pattern (borrow from the bonefishermen here) fished as far as you can cast should do the trick. Be sure to be poling or sculling and the motor is up. anchor is you have to or have a good holding area that you want to work for an hour of the slack or so.
When you can't see 'em and you can't find 'em where they usually are, then motor to where they should be and switch to the fastest sinking head you have and fish the bottom in up to thirty five feet of water. Or . . . drift the side of bars in ten feet of water with the current casting to the skinny water and retrieving as deeply as possible. Or . . . go take a look up to five miles off shore just to be sure there isn't twenty acres of boiling water with feeding stripers in it.
Learn to watch the birds. Gulls scare the bait and the bass down from a blitz much more quickly than do terns. Given the choice on the horizon, go for the terns. See a tern look down as it flies by? Cast there quickly to put your fly on a fish or at least into a group of bait. Gulls sitting on the water? There were fish feeding here recently. Terns flying in one direction to the horizon and no fish around you? Follow the terns (they fly at about 21 knots). Learn to spot a flicker in the sky at the limit of your vision. It's birds. See a column of smoke far away on the horizon? Could be 200 terns wheeling an diving.
One more note on matching the hatch. There are times when you will be surrounded by so many sand eels that there is no reason that a striper will be attracted to your fly. Believe me, this isn't uncommon in July and August. You have three options. You can try to fish deeper than the natural forage, thus presenting your fly to the fish that are below the forage first. You can tie on a monster fly that has three or four sand eel patterns tied on one large hook. This works by offering a mouthful rather than a single fish but is a terror to cast and is ugly as sin. You can switch to a large deceiver or squid pattern and try to "wake up" an occasional bass to another typical meal.
Just remember, safety first when standing, casting and navigating all at once in a rocking boat.
Still in the boating world but closer to the water, let me say that a kayak can be an extremely exciting and a very effective means of approaching spooky fish on the flats of bays and in harbors. Special considerations and preparations are necessary to make kayaking a reasonably safe proposition but these are common sense and not technical. Wear a life preserver. Avoid areas of big power boat usage or high speed lanes. Cross the path of oncoming boats at a perpendicular to increase your visibility (only your torso will be visible above the water otherwise). Don't paddle too far because you have to paddle back and respect seas of any height. Finally, try not to gloat too much about getting into better fish than everyone else; your first "Chatham sleigh ride" while holding onto a big one in the shallows will be the memory of a lifetime. (Note: If you want to practice flycasting from a kayak, try this. Sit on the ground and support your back by holding your knees with your off hand. This is as low as you will be to the water!)
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